Why can we not have cheap electricity?

Take a look around the western world and everything that uses electricity. We live in a wonder land of electrical machinery, appliances and gadgets. When people buy these things, the last thing they think about is how much electricity they use. Far more important are the effectiveness, usefulness and features. When you look at what electricity provides you, it is cheap, amazingly cheap.

Aug 8 2012:
Because manufacturing focusses on profits; more money for businesses, not just meeting needs.
And as long as some people cant have enough money, energy demands will keep increasing more than supply could meet.

Aug 8 2012:
We have the technology for every home to go off the grid. Yet we don't because the power companies can't sell it to you. The companies that are making billions off antiquated technology are paying good money to keep it that way.

Aug 8 2012:
That was a really good answer, but why? Electric decomposition of water is not efficient at the moment, but what if we carried out a little bit more time in finding a more efficient way to separate the oxygen and hydrogen. Why is hydrogen not a good storage medium?

Aug 8 2012:
Yes to both. But our consumption will increase in equal measures and therefore we gain nothing. We might do well to break that trend.

It reminds of the memory and speed evolution of computers. When Digital Equipment Corporation (RIP) develop the Alpha chip at 250 MHZ many of us thought that the 4 fold increase in computer power would make us happy. All that happened was that we wrote bigger programs. My iPad is not faster in use than my 64k - 20MB PC from the 80's (should I have kept it). But in fairness, my computer runs my life now.

Lessons learned: cost of modern commodities is inversely proportional to our usage. Or to put it differently: cost X usage = constant.

Rather than bring electricity cost down, we should focus on the environmental cost. INCREASING cost of electricity could be a brilliant start.